A web developer has stopped providing live football updates via Twitter after governing bodies complained he was infringing their copyright.
Ollie Parsley‘s Footy Tweets site and Twitter feed had been providing live score updates for English Premier League and Football League games, seemingly repurposed from the BBC’s Press Association (PA) feed. But this week he was served with a cease and desist order from Football Data Co (FDC), the fixtures company co-owned by the leagues and which licenses PA as its official live data provider.
FDC complained he was using copyrighted fixtures lists and club badges without authorisation, and said he must buy a license for its PA feed in order to carry on. For one season, that would cost £5,320 for Premier League updates and £10,534 for Football League updates. But even then, that license only allows nine updates per match.
But as Parsley points out, he made no money from the site. But according to FDC’s general manager David Folker (via J.co.uk): “The leagues view live game information as being part of their content in the same way as broadcasting and audio.” As live text updates and tweet-like services become more popular, they are also becoming a rights battleground.
This is the latest in a long line of copyright disputes between footy fan sites and the game’s authorities: in 2005 Football Data Co forced Watford FC fansite Blind, Stupid and Desperate (via Guardian.co.uk) to remove fixtures listings and has given similar threats to many others such as this Arsenal fansite.
This story has a place in the wider battleground of sport IP: as we saw with the 2007 Rugby World Cup and the Australia-New Zealand Test cricket series last year, sport’s governing bodies are keen to restrict the amount of live text updates to protect the rights of their officially licensed providers.
(Football photo: Paul Camera, some rights reserved)
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